The Booth Bench On Moms Porch

She looked at the plate. Then she looked at the bench, and at the empty seat on her right, and at the carved letters she had been sitting on for thirty-seven years.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “It’s getting cold. We’ll wind this up for the winter after one more Friday, and I would not mind a warm room. But the bench stays here, Derrick. It has a place now, and it knows it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And the fish is a little overdone.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But it’s good,” my mother said. “Your great-uncle would have been proud. Sit down, Derrick. There’s a bucket.”

He did not sit down. I do not think he could. He stood at the foot of the steps with his hands in his pockets, and then, to my surprise, he started to cry, quietly, a young man in a work jacket in front of forty-three people he had let down.

Irma got up. She is five foot one. She walked down the steps and put a paper plate in his hands, with a perch on it and a spoon of coleslaw, and said, “Eat, honey. You look terrible.”

He ate. They all watched him eat. And then somebody laughed, kindly, and the whole porch let go of its breath, and it was a Friday again.

Later, when the cars had gone and the stove barrel was down to a red glow, I helped Mom carry the card tables in. She kept the brass plate in both hands the whole time, as if it might be taken from her.

“I’ll bring it Friday,” she said. “Cindy can screw it on the new bench. I am not letting anyone else near it.”

“You could put it on this one.”

“The bench already has a name on it,” she said. “Your father cut it in himself.”

We got the first snow six days later, a wet flurry that melted by noon. The Friday after that, the sixth of November, I drove my mother to the Lamplighter at ten minutes to five. She wore her church coat. She carried her own purse and would not let me hold the door.

Cindy met us at the hostess stand with two menus under her arm and no expression at all.

The muskie hung over the corner booth, and the new oak gleamed under the lamps, and at the end of the bench was a square of bare wood with four small holes drilled in it.

Mom took the brass plate out of her purse and handed it to Cindy, who had a screwdriver in her apron pocket and, I am fairly sure, had carried it there all week.

Then my mother stopped a step short of the booth. She put her hand on the back of the seat, and then she slid in on the left, her side, and laid her purse in the corner the way she had done ten thousand times.

Cindy set down the relish tray. Then she set down two glasses of water, one in front of my mother, and one across from her, and she did not say a word about it. Neither did anyone else.

Mom looked at the second glass for a long moment. Then she lifted her own, and she tipped it, just slightly, toward the empty seat.

“Well, Elwin,” she said. “They’ve still got the cheese spread.”